Edited by Annika Konrad with contributions by Emily Hall, Laura Strickland, Mike Passint, and Julia Boles – “I learned that writing doesn’t need to feel like a near-death experience. I’ve come to actually enjoy it more. By workshopping a vast diversity of papers, I’ve acquired new skills that help me better isolate issues within my own writing.”
By Sarah Dimick – Last winter, during a late afternoon appointment, a graduate student in the history department asked me how he might make the final chapter of his dissertation more compelling.1 We’d already discussed what I think of as skeletal concerns: the order of his paragraphs, the clarity of his topic sentences. We’d already […]
By Stephanie White – I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik’s ageless Paris to the Moon off and on over the last year, savouring it in small portions like a bottle of good Scotch. Gopnik’s descriptions of life in Paris for a non-Parisian family, originally published as a series of New Yorker essays called “Paris Journals,” are warm […]
By Matthew Fledderjohann – Whether I’m responding to a piece of writing as a composition teacher or as a writing center tutor, my comments look similar. I plug in Microsoft Word’s two-toned comment bubbles and write things like, “Hmm . . . I’m not sure how this sentence connects to the purpose of the paragraph. […]
By Hyonbin Choi – Writing your dissertation—or any long research project—is mostly a lonely affair. One dissertator once said to me that it feels like you’re stranded on an island trying to survive, while an occasional surveillance aircraft flies over to check on you. Or even worse, not even that.
By Angela J. Zito – This past fall I led an ongoing education seminar for seven of our graduate writing tutors called “Empirical Research in the Writing Center – What’s so RAD about it?” I cringe at the punny question every time I write it, but I find the implications of the interrogative alluring…curiosity, skepticism, […]
By Neil Simpkins – Prior to attending UW-Madison, I tutored at the Agnes Scott College Center for Writing and Speaking. At Agnes, tutors generally read and annotated drafts of the paper quietly while the student read to herself, got a cup of tea, or relaxed in the center. When I moved to UW-Madison, one of […]
By Micah Kloppenburg – From 2009 to 2011, I served as a Peace Corps Agriculture Volunteer in northern Nicaragua. I lived in a small, idyllic village of 100 farming families at the foot of the climbing cerros called El Carbón. Here, I learned about and worked in the field of community food security. I thought […]
By John Tiedemann Stories without Homes “Are you writing the real story here?” the man at the door asked. I didn’t realize at first that the question was addressed to me. I was sitting at a little plastic folding table at the entrance to the Saint Francis Center, Denver’s largest daytime homeless shelter, where each […]
By Angela J. Zito – This past summer, I had the good fortune to step from the familiar position of tutoring at the UW-Madison Writing Center into two roles new to me: administration as co-coordinator at the Writing Center, and instruction with Madison Writing Assistance (MWA), our center’s community-based arm. While each of these positions […]
